ALBANY COUNTY — As the COVID-19 death toll for Albany County rose to 20 on Wednesday, with four more deaths, Daniel McCoy announced a program that will test people in “the most underserved communities in the county.”

“We have listened and we are going to deliver,” said McCoy, Albany County executive.

Throughout this week, Governor Andrew Cuomo has said that, although the death toll mounts in New York — 752 more died on Tuesday — the state has reached a plateau with new hospital admissions. “The worst is over,” he said.

On Easter Sunday, Cuomo returned loaned ventilators to a Niskayuna nursing home, and on Wednesday he announced that New York would give 50 ventilators to Maryland and 100 to Michigan.

Also on Sunday, Cuomo said he was issuing a new executive order for employers to provide essential workers, for free, with cloth or surgical face masks when they are interacting with the public.

“People want to get on with their lives,” Cuomo said. He called New York Pause — which shut down all nonessential businesses, now until at least April 29 — a “blunt device.”

“The caveat is we need to be smart in the way we reopen. What does smart mean? It means a coordinated approach, a regional approach, and a safe approach. Nobody wants to pick between a public health strategy and an economic strategy,” Cuomo said, calling for more testing and federal assistance.

 On Monday, Cuomo announced that he was joining with neighboring states to create a council to restore the economy and get people back to work.

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts are forming a coordinating group — comprised of one health expert, one economic-development expert and the chiefs of staff from each state — to develop a regional framework to gradually lift the states’ stay-at-home orders while minimizing the risk of increased spread of the virus.

Strategies are to include testing, contact tracing, treatment, and social distancing. Cuomo said that  experts would look at how reopening the economy has been handled in other countries.

The west-coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington are also working together as a regional group on re-entry.

At his press briefing Tuesday, Cuomo said he wouldn’t engage with the president who had tweeted that governors were in mutiny, moving ahead with regional plans on starting to re-open the economy. Cuomo stressed the need to work together.

He cautioned on Wednesday that re-entry would be phased in and he issued an executive order requiring all New Yorkers to wear face masks or face coverings in public. Cuomo also said on Wednesday that the state will start conducting antibody tests this week, prioritizing “frontline workers.” He expects 2,000 of the finger-prick tests will be conducted daily.

The state’s health department has developed its own antibody test to determine who might be immune to the disease, having recovered from it. “We’ve asked the FDA to approve a state test that could get us to 100,000 people per day,” Cuomo said on Wednesday of the Federal Drug Administration.

Plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients is also being used — including at Albany Medical CEnter and St. Peter’s Hospital, both in Albany County — to help patients sick with the disease. (See related story.)

Cuomo this week asked all New Yorkers who have recovered from COVID-19 to contact the state and donate blood. People who have recovered from the virus may have convalescent plasma in their blood, he said, which has antibodies against the virus and could help with the development of a treatment for the virus. More information is available at the New York Blood Center website.

New York now has 213,779 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

“Little reality check, you still have on a day-to-day basis, about 2,000 people who are being diagnosed with COVID,” the governor said at his Wednesday press briefing. “We’re out of the woods? No. We’re still in the woods. The good news is we showed them we can change the curve.”

County launches Mobile testing

“There are huge disparities in the populations we serve and the neighborhoods we hope to take this to,” said David Shippee, president and chief executive officer of the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Health Center, which is based on Lark Drive in Arbor Hill.

The center is partnering with the county to run mobile test sites which, beginning in four locations, people can walk to rather than having to drive.

“There is a high prevalence of chronic conditions there,” said Shippee at the county’s press briefing on Wednesday morning. National data, he said, shows these conditions lead to a greater death rate among people of color.

The new testing sites, he said, “will allow us to make greater decisions about how we move forward over the next couple of weeks and the next couple of months with this pandemic.”

Elizabeth Whalen, Albany County’s health commissioner, and McCoy had pushed for more community testing after initial testing had been narrowed to hospital patients and exposed health-care workers since federal test kits were limited.

On April 6, the state opened a drive-through testing facility in tents at the University of Albany’s uptown campus but the facility would only test “individuals that could drive,” said Whalen.

The tests are important, Whalen said, so her department can identify people that have COVID-19 and reach the people they have been in contact with so those contacts can be put under quarantine to prevent further spread of the coronavirus.

“Another core function of local public health is really to assess the health of the community,” said Whalen. Every three years, her department puts out a community health assessment to identify high-needs neighborhoods “where citizens have disparate health outcomes and underlying health conditions so we can target these neighborhoods.”

Whalen said working toward “test equity” had taken a great deal of discussion and planning and that the mobility of this plan — tents and a mobile unit from Whitney Young will be used — make the sites easily accessible.

“Across the nation, we’re hearing about disparate outcomes of COVID-19 dependent on race,” said Whalen. “The data we have so far is not robust enough to see how this is playing out in Albany County.”

By Wednesday, 515 Albany County residents had tested positive for coronavirus disease 2019 and there were  663 people under mandatory quarantine and 71 people under precautionary quarantine. Also 29 people were hospitalized with 12 of them in intensive-care units.

Almost all of the county deaths have been elderly people with underlying health conditions. The four deaths on Tuesday followed that pattern. Two of the patients were men in their sixties, another was a woman in her seventies, and the third was a woman in her eighties. All four had underlying health complications.

While Whalen said it was a good thing that Albany County hadn’t reached surge capacity at its hospitals, she said the health department had been at surge capacity since day one. Hours were expanded to seven days a week and workers from other departments were enlisted as well as volunteers in the county’s reserve medical corps.

Micheline Ford, a critical-care doctor at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady said that, in serving on the frontlines, “We’ve been seeing a disproportionate amount of African Americans that have been sick but also dying.”

Explaining why, Ford said, “It goes back to African Americans being high risk for diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, renal disease, and obesity as well as underlying heart disease, and a lot of these issues are sometimes not known in the African-American community. People are walking around not knowing they have high blood pressure or diabetes … .

“It’s often ignored … or there’s not access to health care. They have no transportation to healthcare or they have no insurance for healthcare … We are seeing a lot of patients coming in late.”

Ford called the pandemic “a wake-up call for the African-American community.”

“We’re diagnosing them in the hospital while they’re on ventilators,” she said. “It’s a whole new ballgame.”

She also advised, “We have to let our African-Americans know, number one, if you’re not healthy, you have to stay home, you have to wear a mask, and you have to limit distance and limit exposure to people … Number two, you have to take care of yourself. Take your medication even though you feel fine.”

“We don’t care if you don’t have insurance,” said McCoy. We don’t care if you can’t pay. The county is paying for it … don’t worry about it.”

Whitney Young is supplying staff for the mobile testing sites, said Shippee, and the tests are being processed by the same laboratory that is doing the work for the state’s UAlbany site; $55 is the retail price on processing each test, he said.

The Whitney Young Center, at 920 Lark Drive in Albany, is open every day from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and testing begins there on Friday. The other three mobile sites are rotational with a morning location and an afternoon location. Times and addresses are posted on the county’s website.

All testing is done by appointment only and after the person is screened for symptoms over the phone by calling the Whitney Young, Jr. Health Center at 518-465-4771.